Imagine if someone, after reading something you wrote online that they didn’t agree with, decided to forge racist and anti-Semitic emails under your name. This appears to be what happened to J. Alex Halderman, a computer security researcher and professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. Halderman is one of many election security experts—along with EFF, of course—who has advocated for auditing the results of the 2016 presidential election. The recent attempts to smear his name in retaliation for standing up for election integrity are a threat to online free speech. Halderman, who is a frequent collaborator and sometimes client of EFF, published a piece on Medium in November 2016 arguing that we should perform recounts in three states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—to ensure that the election had not been “hacked.” To be clear, despite a report in New York Magazine, Halderman never stated that there was hard evidence that the election results had in fact been electronically manipulated. He just stated that we should check to be sure:
The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Concern over a “hacked election” isn’t unfounded. In 2014, pro-Russia hacking collective CyberBerkut attempted to sabatoge Ukrainian’s vote-counting infrastructure just prior to a presidential election. This is just one example. With these threats out there, auditing should be basic election hygiene. As computer security expert Poorvi Vora of George Washington University says, “Brush your teeth. Eat your spinach. Audit your elections.” Halderman specifically calls in his post for risk-limiting audits, a statistical method we’ve also advocated for that involves randomly selecting a certain number of paper ballots for manual recount. And it’s something we should be doing after every election. It’s a no-brainer.
Someone, however, does not agree. On February 7, about two and a half months after Halderman’s post, someone sent racist and anti-Semitic emails to University of Michigan engineering students purporting to be from Halderman. According to the AP, the emails had subject lines like “African American Student Diversity” and “Jewish Student Diversity,” and two of the emails contained the phrase “Heil Trump.”
Full Article: Not Okay: Professor Smeared After Advocating for Election Integrity | Electronic Frontier Foundation.